Unemployment hit a 54-year-low at 3.4% back in January of 2023, and U.S. employers added 2.7 million people to the payroll in 2023 alone.

The January jobs report also showed the 2024 labor market was off to a solid start.

When we look at the hard data, it seems to suggest that the labor market has been fairly strong and in fact, surprisingly resilient, especially after 2023 where we had headlines about layoffs and forecasts of recession.

But when you look at the soft data, Americans tend to be a little bit less optimistic about how the economy is doing and in particular about the job market.

Politicians just talking about how the economy is so great. I just want to scream from the rooftops.

But then how come no one can find a job?

Recently, unemployed full time workers applied to an average of 30 jobs only to receive an average of four callbacks or responses.

If you look at the job vacancies, they're down a little bit, but not down enormously.

But if you ask, you know, how hard are you working to fill them?

The answer seems to be not very right now.

So why does it feel so hard to get a job right now?

And is the U.S. labor market as strong as it seems?

Hi. My name is Jenna Jackson.

I'm from Ardmore, Pennsylvania, in suburbs of Philadelphia.

This job market is like the craziest that I have ever seen.

I was frustrated just with how my job search process has been going.

I haven't quantified how many applications I've applied to.

It would be a little depressing, I feel at this point to quantify it.

But it was definitely in the hundreds, at least.

55% of unemployed adults said they were burnt out from searching for a new job.

Younger generations were impacted the most, with 66% complaining of burnout stemming from job search.

Looking for a job can be a full time job.

There's a lot that goes into it.

Filling out applications online can be tedious and can be time consuming and can be really stressful.

Every day, it just feels like Groundhog Day or waking up doing the same thing.

When I looked at the data, if you just applied to a job through a job board, the odds of you getting hired were about 3%.

So you got to apply to a lot of different jobs in order to have a chance to get them.

And you're going to get lots and lots of just no responses. And it's exhausting if you do that.

A 2023 study from Glassdoor revealed that mentions of applicants being ghosted by their prospective employers grew substantially since before the Covid 19 pandemic.

We often hear from job seekers that they send out tons and tons of applications, and they don't even hear back, and that can be very emotionally and mentally taxing.

It's unprofessional as well.

It's like, especially if you're going to take the time to do an interview with them, you could at least let them know.

I think it's because of technology.

It's easy to put up a job and so many people can see that job. So when you get such an overwhelming response, it's often very difficult to get back to every single solitary candidate.

Certainly during the Great Resignation, when the market was at a fever pitch, companies were being ghosted by candidates, which is something that hadn't happened as much in the past.

So we've seen it happen on both sides of the fence.

And I think a lot of it is caused by just sheer volume.

The time it takes for a company to hire an employee also hit an all time high at an average of 44 days during the first quarter of 2023, with some industries like the energy and defense sector taking more than 67 days for hire.

Application process has been getting longer and longer with going through multiple rounds and doing assessments.

My worst experience so far was with a large financial institution where I had a phone screen with them, and I also had a Zoom interview with one of the team members.

After that, I had a case study where I was given very vague instructions.

They got back to me and said that the team didn't feel like there was enough, that they gave me another attempt.

In the end, I just ended up just going back to the recruiter and saying like, you know, 'I'm sorry, I don't think this is the best fit.'

Becauseeven if I did move forward and they were okay with my revision, there still would have been three more interviews.

A lot of employers think that doing more interviews is a good thing.

And it's not a good thing.

Most job interviews are not doing anything important.

They don't know that the questions they're asking are going to reveal anything about whether you are a good candidate or not.

They don't know when they ask the question what the right answer is.

And this is a development that's been going on for a while.

It's not a good thing for anybody.

And even if the labor market was stronger, you would still be seeing some of this.

There are generally two terms economists use to describe the state of the job market tight and loose.

Usually when economists talk about a tight labor market, they mean hot, essentially.

Mostly what that means is it is difficult for employers to find workers.

And so in that context, employers tend to be more hesitant to lay off workers.

They tend to try to be more aggressive about how they hire, whether that means offering bonuses or offering on-the-job training.

By contrast, a loose labor market or cold labor market is one where there might be layoffs, it might be hiring freezes.

It might be difficult to find a job for workers who are either already in the workforce or workers who are trying to enter the workforce for the first time.

The American labor market has remained extremely tight, following the end of the pandemic.

So many companies had to scale back during the pandemic, and then all at once, companies were able to hire again as their businesses started to move.

So you had so many job openings happening all at the same time.

Job openings surged to historic highs while the country continued to struggle from the devastating labor shortage.

With so many plentiful job prospects, even working Americans quit their jobs at a record pace for new jobs, in a trend that came to be known as the Great Resignation.

But the job market is beginning to show signs of cooling.

There's less of a frenzy on the part of the employers.

If you're somebody who wants a job, you would like a frenzy on the part of the employers because you would like to have lots of people trying to hire you.

I think one interesting thing about the job market right now is that it is strong, but the hiring rate is low, and similarly the layoff rate is actually very low.

The layoff and discharge rate in the U.S. has been hovering near historic lows, despite the barrage of layoffs reported specifically within the more visible tech and media sectors.

So I think what might be going on here is that employers are hesitant to lay off workers.

They're hesitant to push workers out because of their recent experience with labor shortages.

But on the flip side, that also means that a lot of workers are sitting tight.

They're not quitting, they're not being laid off.

And so there aren't as many of those opportunities you would normally expect from attrition for folks who are trying to break into those roles.

Meanwhile, research from LinkedIn found that job seekers search intensity in the U.S. grew by 27% in 2023 compared to the year before.

In 2022, there was one open job for every active applicant on the LinkedIn platform.

By 2023, the ratio turned to one job for every two active applicants.

Right now in the marketplace, what we're seeing is both employers and employees being a little bit more selective.

Everybody's taking a little bit more of a measured approach right now, being a little bit more selective in their choices.

And that's why we've seen a little bit of a cooling in the marketplace.

However, experts reassure that the cooling labor market is no reason for concern yet.

It is important to have a perspective that's a little more historical on this.

You know, if you're hunting for a job right now and you can't find one, it looks like a lousy job market to you.

But compared to your parents experience, it's a great job market.

I think that sentiment is outcomes minus expectations.

So in 2021, 2022, there were labor shortages.

Companies were hiring very aggressively.

And so even if 2024 is shaping up to be a relatively healthy labor market by recent comparison, it doesn't feel quite as strong.

A cooldown in the labor market was also what the Federal Reserve had intended with its series of interest rate hikes.

If you are the Federal Reserve and you want to slow the economy down, that means you want to slow the markets down a bit.

The biggest market is the labor market.

If you look at what employers do, where their budget is, it's mainly going to labor.

So you can't easily cool the economy down unless you cool the labor market down.

Experts also noted that the health of the labor market will largely rely on where the economy is headed next.

If the economy does slow down more significantly in 2024, if we see a recession in 2024, the labor market can be somewhat resilient, but it can't fully buck the broader economic trends.

And so that's definitely something we want to watch out for in 2024.

It's not a guarantee that the job market is going to remain as strong.

Broadly speaking, we might have some optimism about the economy.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the job search is an easy process.

I guess the big thing I would say is it's not you.

It's not you. It's happening to thousands of other, hundreds of thousands of people at the same time.

And it has to do with what's going on in the bigger economy. It has to do with uncertainty, but it also has to do with a lot of quirkiness inside employers about how they handle hiring these days.

It's definitely, um, difficult out there.

But I just encourage you not to give up and still keep diving into your network and stay tight with family and friends,

just to give you the emotional support that you might be lacking at the moment and to give you that confidence that you can do it.